Related papers: Back to Bytes: Revisiting Tokenization Through UTF…
Modern language models are trained almost exclusively on token sequences produced by a fixed tokenizer, an external lossless compressor often over UTF-8 byte sequences, thereby coupling the model to that compressor. This work introduces…
Tokenization is a crucial step in information retrieval, especially for lexical matching algorithms, where the quality of indexable tokens directly impacts the effectiveness of a retrieval system. Since different languages have unique…
Modern language models mostly take sub-words as input, a design that balances the trade-off between vocabulary size, number of parameters, and performance. However, sub-word tokenization still has disadvantages like not being robust to…
Most widely-used pre-trained language models operate on sequences of tokens corresponding to word or subword units. By comparison, token-free models that operate directly on raw text (bytes or characters) have many benefits: they can…
Speech tokenization is crucial in digital speech processing, converting continuous speech signals into discrete units for various computational tasks. This paper introduces a novel speech tokenizer with broad applicability across downstream…
Modern language models still rely on fixed, pre-defined subword tokenizations. Once a tokenizer is trained, the LM can only operate at this fixed level of granularity, which often leads to brittle and counterintuitive behaviors even in…
Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently…
We propose a novel approach to optimizing a byte-level representation for end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR). Byte-level representation is often used by large scale multilingual ASR systems when the character set of the supported…
To drive progress in science and engineering, large language models (LLMs) must be able to process large amounts of numerical data and solve long calculations efficiently. This is currently only possible through the use of external tools or…
Tokenization is a fundamental component of language models for code. It involves breaking down the input into units that are later passed to the language model stack to learn high-dimensional representations used in various contexts, from…
Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models…
Models that rely on subword tokenization have significant drawbacks, such as sensitivity to character-level noise like spelling errors and inconsistent compression rates across different languages and scripts. While character- or byte-level…
Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing, breaking text into units that computational models can process. While learned subword tokenizers have become the de-facto standard, they present challenges such as large…
The majority of online content is written in languages other than English, and is most commonly encoded in UTF-8, the world's dominant Unicode character encoding. Traditional compression algorithms typically operate on individual bytes.…
Discrete visual tokenizers transform images into a sequence of tokens, enabling token-based visual generation akin to language models. However, this process is inherently challenging, as it requires both compressing visual signals into a…
Tokenization significantly influences language models(LMs)' performance. This paper traces the evolution of tokenizers from word-level to subword-level, analyzing how they balance tokens and types to enhance model adaptability while…
The majority of text is stored in UTF-8, which must be validated on ingestion. We present the lookup algorithm, which outperforms UTF-8 validation routines used in many libraries and languages by more than 10 times using commonly available…
The Byte Pair Encoding algorithm can be safely batched to merge hundreds of pairs of tokens at a time when building up a tokenizer's vocabulary. This technique combined with reducing the memory footprint of text used in vocabulary training…
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a foundational component of industrial prototyping, where models are defined not by raw coordinates but by construction sequences such as sketches and extrusions. This sequential structure enables both…
Character-level language models obviate the need for separately trained tokenizers, but efficiency suffers from longer sequence lengths. Learning to combine character representations into tokens has made training these models more…